“I’ve brought something to you, sir.”
Whoever he was held in his arms something that looked like a baggy pillow.
“What the devil is that?”
“Mrs. Fountain sends it up, sir. This is a stocking sewn shut, and it is filled with seed. It has been heated on the hearth, and you can drape it across sore muscles, like so. She said you . . .” He paused and looked upward as if he’d been given something to recite. “. . . needed something warm to cover ‘your poor, wounded body.’ ”
The strapping footman draped it over his own neck and turned this way and that, demonstrating. Then he extended it to Lavay.
Philippe’s hand reached out slowly.
He was strangely reluctant to take it, because he recognized it for the message it was meant to be. A peculiar little hot spot of shame burned in his gut. He felt . . . spurned, of all things.
Which was absurd, and patently not a familiar sensation for him, particularly at the hands of a woman. Let alone a servant. And why he should feel spurned when in fact the gesture was . . .
He finally took it from Ramsey.
“Tell Mrs. Fountain . . .”
“Yes, sir?”
He quirked his mouth wryly. “Tell Mrs. Fountain it was a very kind thing to do.”
AND BECAUSE ELISE was a woman of her word, and because the reverend and Mrs. Sylvaine had kindly offered to fetch her in their horse and cart, she went to the pub on her night off, after Mary and Kitty had promised to look in on Jack periodically until Elise arrived home, well before midnight.
A wave of light and sound and merriment washed over them as they pushed the pub door open. Ironically, it was a bit like entering the vicarage—the church and the pub shared the same clientele, after all. And like a church, its ancient timbers seemed to have absorbed a bit of everyone and everything that had passed through: smoke from fires and cigars both rank and rare, spilled ale, the savory smell of centuries’ worth of roasted haunches and meat pies. The chairs and tables were battered but sturdy and burnished by centuries of handling and shifting bums.
A table had been reserved for the popular Reverend Sylvaine next to the fire, and she settled in with the reverend and his wife amidst the laughter, clinking glasses, uprising voices, and stomping feet, all of it in response to the musicians in the corner, who were making a beautiful racket.
Seamus was in the throes of a jig when they entered, tossing his head, his bow arm a blur. He brought it to a melodramatic finish with a final vigorous head toss and thrusting his fiddle and bow up in the air, like an acrobat landing.
A delighted cheer went up, and everyone shouted requests. Seamus pointed his bow at someone in the crowd, and they called out a request that Elise couldn’t quite hear.
But when the song began, she recognized it instantly.
Seamus’s voice rose above the noise, which soon became a hush, in thrall to his singing.
What’s this dull town to me?
Robin’s not near;
What was’t I wish’d to see?
What wish’d to hear?
Where all the joy and mirth,
Made this town Heav’n on earth,
Oh! they’ve all fled wi’ thee,
Robin Adair
Robin Adair. Ironically, quite syllabically similar to Philippe Lavay. And now, through all the rest of the verses, that was all she could hear.
“I think I need a bit of fresh air,” she said abruptly to the vicar and his wife, and before they could say anything, she shoved her chair back swiftly, wound her way through the crowd, pushed open the door, and leaned up against the side of the Pig & Thistle in the merciful, vast silence.
And breathed in.
And breathed out.
The sky was midnight blue. The stars were silver.
And her breath made little white ghosts.
The door swung open a few minutes later, and she gave a start.
Whoever it was hovered a moment in the dark.
“It’s a midnight blue sky, Mrs. Fountain.”
It was Seamus.
She smiled. “The livery will be absolutely beautiful. Thank you again, Mr. Duggan. I was just out here trying to think of how I will obtain silk stockings for two very tall footmen. They’re so very dear.”
Seamus leaned against the wall near her, fiddle dangling from his hand.
“Oh, I’m not certain that’s the reason ye’re out here. ‘Tis a lively crowd in there. Good friends, good music, the best ale in all of England. And yet ye still look lonely, Mrs. Fountain, and ye’re out here with the stars.”
She sighed. “You do play very well, Mr. Duggan.”
“Aye,” he agreed without vanity. “Were ye moved?”
“Oh, perhaps. But probably not for the reasons you hoped.”
That emerged even more acerbically than she’d intended.
There was a silence.
“There’s more to me than people think, Mrs. Fountain.” He said it quietly.
Imagine her bruising Seamus Duggan’s dignity.
She was hurting feelings left and right these days, she suspected.
Saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing. Touching the wrong hands and the like. She’d never viewed herself as a vixen, and she didn’t like it.
“I suppose people can only draw conclusions based on what they see, Mr. Duggan. And the most recent thing anyone saw was you stealing a kiss from Miss Annie Wimpole.”
He laughed. “What is life but not a great buffet of little pleasures to be stolen?”
“I think men get away with stealing those pleasures more frequently than women do.”
He gave a little grunt of a laugh, a rueful one. “Aye, lass, you’re likely right.”
“Mr. Duggan, I believe the only reason you’re interested in me is that you’re certain I’m not interested in you.”
“Nay, that’s not the only reason,” he said shrewdly, but he didn’t expound and he didn’t sound the least insulted. His voice softened. “Who has your heart, Mrs. Fountain? Because if there’s one thing I recognize, it’s a woman who has given hers away with naught to show for it in return.”
She was shocked.
She didn’t need a life full of men who pointed out uncomfortable truths to her.
Her silence was probably incriminating, but she could think of nothing glib to say.
But surely she hadn’t “given her heart away,” of all things. What an absurdly poetic way to put it; trust a sentimental Irishman full of ale to say it.
Still, all she could think of was how lovely it would be to linger outside the pub and look up at the stars whilst standing next to Lord Lavay, maybe leaning a bit into that vast chest that was simply made for leaning, and feeling it rumble as he sang along to pub songs.
It was as fanciful and hopeless a yearning as any woman had ever had, and she hadn’t the right to it.
But there was something amiss when a feeling was so large and uncontainable that she preferred to be outside with it, alone among the stars, than inside, where the room was alive with sound and merriment and people who were more appropriate to . . . what was the word . . . ? Ah, yes. “Station.” Of course.
“You could do worse than me,” Seamus said. Sounding perfectly serious.
“A lot worse,” she agreed generously. It wasn’t altogether complimentary.
He laughed at that and turned to go back inside. “I’ll see Reverend Sylvaine takes ye home if ye’d like.”
“I’ll stay a bit longer,” she said stoutly.
And she did.
WITH MRS. FOUNTAIN at the helm, day by day, room by room, Alder House became cleaner, brighter, more comfortable. More like a home. Meals improved. Morale improved. The weather improved. Lavay’s health improved.
Lavay’s mood did not improve.
Or rather it metamorphosed into restlessness. Now, thanks to Mrs. Fountain’s willow bark tea and her admonishment to rub it himself, walking and bending were both a bit easier, and he took to roaming the halls of the house, peering out windows, startling the chambermaids at their work. On days when it wasn’t pissing down rain, he ventured into the garden. He once walked nearly as far as Postlethwaite’s Emporium, but he paid for it when he returned home. He was winded, of all things—he who had always been so effortlessly fit—and nearly everything on him throbbed, and not in a thrilling way. He was forced to lie still and rest, which infuriated him, but fury made him tense, so he forced himself to relax, and to breathe in and out, evenly.
If he was patient, he might be on a horse before the winter was out. But patience was almost a skill he needed to learn, as deliberately as he’d once learned fencing or chess. Nothing about his life had required it of him in recent years. For so long it had been all ceaseless, instantaneous reaction and defense.
He somehow rarely encountered Mrs. Fountain in his restless wanderings. Perhaps she’d acquired an instinct for dodging him.
He could have invented an excuse to see her. He paid her to answer to a bell, after all. But three times daily she sent up footmen with willow bark tea, and he accepted it as humbly as if each cup were a chastisement.
The two of them, he and Mrs. Fountain, were almost like two people who were recovering from an embarrassment, as if she’d caught him picking his nose, or scratching some intimate place. He still felt a little raw, for reasons he couldn’t quite identify.
And as he held himself still but not too still, and forced himself to improve his mind with Marcus Aurelius, he was all too aware of the two pieces of correspondence requiring his attention. His penmanship was still far from flawless, thanks to his stiff hand. Both pieces of correspondence represented decisions that would determine the rest of his life. And neither would wait forever for him to make up his mind.
He’d sailed the high seas, survived the rabble during the revolution, and fought off six cutthroats in London.
Never in his wildest dreams had he thought he would ever need to muster nerve to ring for a housekeeper.
ELISE WAS ALL too aware of how inert her bell had been lately. But it wasn’t the silence of endings. The silence was alive with tension. It was a bit like the wait between skirmishes in a battle—or perhaps more accurately, the rest between movements in a symphony, a melodramatic metaphor she allowed herself when she lay awake at night, attempting to count sheep and instead holding her own hand and pretending it was Lavay’s, to her own helpless chagrin. Or chagreen.
Tonight she promised herself she would do no such thing.
She decided this temporary silence presented the perfect opportunity to tamp down all her fancies and solidify her control so that the next time he rang—for he would ring again, she was certain of it—her heart, let alone the rest of her, wouldn’t so much as twinge.
And besides, she had more mundane things to worry about at the moment. For instance, how the devil was she going to obtain silk stockings for the footmen? All the livery now required was finishing touches, and James and Ramsey looked thrillingly elegant in it.
Alone in her room—Jack was tucked into bed—she freed her hair from its pins and placed them all neatly in a bowl on the little desk. Then she took up her ivory-backed hairbrush, a gift from her mother on her fourteenth birthday.
One hundred strokes nightly before plaiting her hair. The receipt for apple tarts, for simples and tisanes and soaps and milks for the complexion. The need for and pleasure in beauty, the ability to find it in the humble, the everyday. Her mother had taught her all of this. They were so alike in many ways, from the big, dark eyes to their quick minds.
Now that she was a mother, it seemed inconceivable that her own could ever have loved her if she shunned her now. Nothing Jack ever did would stop her from loving him, even if he ended up being sent to the gallows, God forbid, in which case, she’d do everything in her power to make sure he’d disappear from them in a puff of smoke a la Colin Eversea and live on as a folk hero.
She ran her thumb lightly over the initials engraved on the back of her brush. ELF. Elise Louise Fountain.
She’d once thought her parents’ love was just as permanent as those initials.
Intervening years buffered the wound like layers of cotton wool, but when she was weary, she felt it, the way an old injury aches when it rains.
She did own another brush. But this one was, as she’d told Lord Lavay, one of the few things she’d seized when she’d been told to leave her parents’ home for good. It had been so precious to her, a gift that made her feel loved and grown up.
And she knew how to get those silk stockings now.
Because she’d learned that when she was at her lowest, there was pleasure in making other people happy, and she could make James and Ramsey happy.
But mostly she could make Lord Lavay happy, which was really all she wanted to do, if she was being honest with herself. And she was usually unfailingly, ruthlessly honest with herself.
“Are you at one hundred, Mama?” Jack called, familiar with the nightly routine.
“One hundred. I’ll be right in with a story.”
“The one about the lion!”
“Naturally,” she said.
THE NEXT DAY, Mr. Postlethwaite was arranging a selection of lady’s combs in what he hoped was the most enticing fashion when the bell jangled on the shop door.
He swiveled to beam at Elise.
“Well, good morning to you, Mrs. Fountain. Are you bringing more letters to post?”
“I have a proposition for you, Mr. Postlethwaite.”
“Ah, so seldom are my days enlivened by propositions from comely young ladies anymore. Please go on.”
“Would it be possible to trade this for a pair of silk stockings? Silk stockings for men, that is?”
She produced her hairbrush.
To his credit, Mr. Postlethwaite didn’t even blink. He took it and hefted it, turned it this way and that, studying it with a merchant’s eye.
“Ah, it’s lovely, Mrs. Fountain. The initials on it . . . they are yours?”
“Yes.”
“ELF. Whimsical, really.”
“I suppose. Do you think someone would buy it even with the initials on it?”
“Oh, certainly. Eventually. It’s a lovely brush, and the initials are unobtrusive enough. I’d be happy to effect a trade. Go and choose your stockings, Mrs. Fountain.”
Chapter 14
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, PHILIPPE woke with a start. Again, he thought he heard heated whispering outside his door.
And then came, unsurprisingly, a tap.
He yawned. “Enter,” he rasped.
The door swung open. To his shock, a masculine voice said, “I am at your service, sir, if you would like assistance with dressing.”
Lavay propped himself upright and stared. He rubbed his fists in his eyes and took another look.
Surely he was dreaming he was back at Les Pierres d’Argent. Because standing before him was a tall, proper, elegant footman . . .
. . . and he was dressed in midnight blue.
Trimmed in silver braid.
Philippe slid out of bed and circled him as if he were an apparition.
He slowly reached out a finger and gave him a tiny poke.
The man didn’t budge or so much as blink.
“Who the devil are you?” he finally asked.
“I’m Ramsey, sir. Your footman, sir.”
“You’re one of the pair of footmen that came with this house?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why are you here?”
“I won the coin toss, sir.”
“The . . .”
“Mrs. Fountain was unable to decide whic
h of us to send to attend upon you, as we both, as she said, ‘suited.’ We tossed a ha’pence, sir. Lion side up, and here I am.”
Philippe stood back and studied him. He shook his head to and fro slowly. He was an absolute vision in well-cut livery, a striped waistcoat, pale silk stockings, and shoes that were polished to mirror brilliance.
Lavay gave a short, wondering laugh.
“Well, you’re magnifique, Ramsey.”
“Thank you, sir. I think.”
“You do thank me,” Philippe confirmed. “It means you look magnificent.”
Ramsey didn’t twitch a brow or alter his expression. He was impassive and regal. His posture was as straight as a mizzenmast. He was every inch the sort of footman Philippe had known his entire life.
And wonder poured through him like sunlight.
“And thank you, sir, for being so kind as to think of myself and James. Mrs. Fountain told us it was your idea.”
A clever strategic move on Mrs. Fountain’s part. “Mrs. Fountain may have made suggestions, to which I agreed. Never forget how very fortunate you are that she is in charge of the house, Ramsey. She is a . . . she is a miracle.”
“Of course, sir. She runs a very tight ship.”
Lavay smiled. He suddenly felt made of light.
“Please tell me how I may be of service, my lord.”
“Well . . . how are you with a razor, Ramsey?”
“I could shave a baby’s bottom and leave nary a nick.”
“Well, then, you ought to be able to shave me, I suppose.”
“But of course, sir. And might I suggest the nankeen trousers today, if you intend to go out? The weather is inclement, sir.”
“I thank you for the suggestion. But right after we’ve made me presentable, Ramsey, there’s something I’d like you to do.”
ELISE WAS WAITING in the kitchen with bated breath for Ramsey’s return, but she hadn’t expected him to return at a run.
“Quickly, Mrs. Fountain! There’s no time to lose! Lord Lavay wants you to fetch the vase from your room and bring it to him immediately!”
“The what? But what did he say about—”
“Go, Mrs. Fountain! Go!”
It Started with a Scandal Page 14
