Wherein a Vegetable Is Clothed
“A parcel arrived for ye, m’lady.” Mrs. Booth extended a paper-wrapped package to Audrina when she entered the otherwise-empty public room the following morning. “Las’ mail coach to get through before the snow blocked the roads late las’ night.”
“A parcel was addressed to me here?” How odd. It was far too soon for any forgotten item to be sent from Castle Parr.
Oh. Perhaps it had been sent by her father? No, that was illogical. He could not know where she was.
Her fingers fumbled on the twine about the parcel. Steady.
Audrina thanked the hostess and found coins to pay her back for the postage. Mrs. Booth dipped a polite curtsy and went back to wiping off tables. Their small party had all risen at different times and breakfasted simply and separately. There had been sliced ham enough for a dozen guests, though the bread was running low.
Not that anyone else would be arriving to eat it today. Overnight, it looked as though the Almighty had slit His down mattress over the world. The snow had fallen in great fluffy flakes, piled high over the ice and slush that had plagued them during the previous day’s travel. Today the road was not only impassable, but invisible.
Trapped.
No. She had been more trapped before than this. She was safe. She was all right.
With a deep breath, then another, she seated herself at a table in the corner to open her parcel. It was a flimsy, tiny thing—and as soon as she pulled back the paper, she saw why.
There lay a silk ribbon and lace garter, embroidered in purple and gold with her initials. Unmistakably one of her most personal belongings; unmistakably one of the pair filched by Llewellyn with the help of Audrina’s former maid.
A note was enclosed with it:
One more where this came from. One more is all I need.
December 31.
The snow outside seemed to be piled upon her chest: heavy, freezing, choking. For a long moment she could only stare at it while her brain whirled with useless hows and whys.
She rewrapped the garter and pressed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. All right. She knew why: Llewellyn wanted to remind her of his threat. To feel desperate at the countdown of the ticking clock. Maybe even to be more willing to marry him. Anything to save her family the humiliation, the ruination, of the otherwise-inevitable jilting by the Duke of Walpole.
She lowered her hands with a thump. That was the why of the parcel. But how had it come to be here? Did Llewellyn think she had never left the Goat and Gauntlet?
Turning it over, she studied the postal markings. The garter had been sent not from London, but York itself.
A prickle between her shoulder blades made her shift in her seat. Llewellyn couldn’t be here. Behind her. He wasn’t. She knew that, and yet . . .
With a quick twist of her head, she looked out through the row of mullioned windows that faced the main road. Nothing. No one. Just deep, unbroken snow. And no one was staying at the Goat and Gauntlet save their party and Kitty.
He must have had someone else post this for him. Once he reached London with Audrina’s father, Llewellyn would not have slipped away again; not if he could catch the ear of a duke. How much was it worth to him to be brother-in-law to Walpole? Far more than Audrina’s dowry, probably. Certainly far more than her father could pay.
Rain had turned to ice had turned to snow, and she had never felt so far away from where she ought to be.
Another deep breath. There was little she could do about that right now. Little to pass the time; little to take her mind away from the impossible.
Little, but not nothing. Her father wasn’t here to tell her to stay out of the kitchen this time. She could make something, could do something worthwhile, no matter how small.
“Mrs. Booth.” She pushed back her chair and stood, addressing the publican’s wife, who was still wiping tables at the other end of the public room. “Would you permit me to bake something in your kitchen? Bread for dinner, or some sort of Christmas pastry?”
Mrs. Booth’s mouth made an oh as she straightened up. “Well, now, m’lady, that’s a righ’ generous offer. But I shouldna like you to go to any trouble. Especially with it being Sunday and all.”
“We must have bread, no matter the day,” Audrina replied. “I was taught by the Earl of Alleyneham’s favorite cook.”
She disliked using her father’s title at this moment, but it had the intended effect of smoothing some of the doubt from Mrs. Booth’s sonsy features. “If my baking fails,” she added, “I will certainly recompense you for the supplies used.”
Aha. With the magical reassurances of nobility and money, the doubt was entirely gone. Mrs. Booth bobbed a curtsy. “M’lady, I should be delighted. Thank you. On Christmas Eve, why not have as much good things about us as we can get?”
“As you say, why not? I assume the weather will keep some of your staff at home, so perhaps this will ease the load on those who are here.”
With a hand at the small of her back, the publican’s wife admitted that only one maid and the stableboy lived in. Though she did the cooking herself, the baking was usually done by a kitchen maid. “She an’ the others who work here don’t live far, but they won’t be able to get in today with the snow as deep as your chin.”
This was an exaggeration on the level of at least one human torso, but Audrina made a sound of sympathy. “You have not much help today for such a grand place as this. As soon as I stow my parcel, I will get right to the kitchen.”
Another curtsy. “Once my maid, Jeanette, finishes her work, she might be able to give you a hand wi’ the baking.”
Scooping up the paper-wrapped garter—she felt distaste at touching it, though it was her own belonging—Audrina raced up the stairs to her bedchamber, the same one in which she had stayed the night of her unexpected arrival in York. Her breath came more quickly than it ought after such a short flight.
The fire had been banked, but a nudge with a poker turned over coals hot enough to burn the parcel’s paper wrappings and Llewellyn’s note. It was a tiny triumph to watch ash eat the terrible words and crumble them to nothing, though she would not forget them so quickly. Eyeing the garter, she considered throwing it in the fire, too, but settled for stuffing it into her trunk along with a few other oddments that Lady Irving’s maid had not unpacked. It was hers, for God’s sake. There could be nothing wrong with having it in her chamber.
Right. Wiping her hands on her skirts, a cotton print of thin brown and blue stripes, she closed the door on that morning’s unpleasant surprise and went in search of the kitchen.
It would be on the ground floor, she knew. As Audrina checked one doorway after another for the right room, she heard male and female laughter mingled. Across from the servants’ stairs she found both the kitchen and the source of the laughter.
It was a comely room, similar in its trappings to the kitchen from which Audrina had once been chased at Alleyneham House. The whitewashed walls were bright, with light slanting in from large windows next to which were arrayed gleaming tin-lined copper vessels. At the center of the space stood a huge wooden worktable and a laughing Giles Rutherford and Kitty Balthasar.
Audrina peered past them to see what they were looking at. “Is that a vegetable marrow?” She squinted at the large green gourd. “Wearing a diaper?”
Giles turned first, his grin still in place. “Audrina!” He sounded so pleased to see her that she couldn’t help grinning back. Not that it was difficult to enjoy the sight of a big, broad red-haired man with a sweet scoop of a dimple.
Kitty matched their smiles. Though dressed in the same print gown as the previous day, she looked much less bedraggled and fragile. “Mr. Rutherford told me he had a houseful of younger brothers and sisters. I was never around a baby before, so I’d best learn how to care for one before my own’s born in another two months.”
“So he taught you to put a diaper on a vegetable marrow.” Audrina held up a hand. “No, Giles, there is no need for explanation. It makes perfect sense. What else would you use? After all, an apple or a sack of walnuts wearing a diaper would be ridiculous.”
“To be strictly accurate,” Giles said, “it’s not a diaper. It’s one of Mrs. Booth’s finest napkins, so don’t tell her.”
Kitty laughed again, one thin hand resting on her great ball of a belly. “Oh, Lady Audrina, I’d no idea the cloth had to be folded so many times. Only imagine the disaster if I hadn’t learned.”
“It would indeed be a disaster for your clothing.” With a little wave, Audrina took an apron from a hook, then slipped behind the pair of them to the far side of the kitchen. “Carry on with your diapering lesson; do not let me stop you. I am searching for the pantry.”
Holding on to the cloth about the wizened, bulbous old vegetable marrow, Giles flung out an elbow. “It’s that way. Step across the corridor, right at the corner of the building. That’s where we found the marrow.”
He turned back to his task, and as Audrina passed through the doorway into the scullery, she heard him add, “Once it’s nicely folded, you can tie it around the baby’s waist, like a little sash, or fasten it with a pin.” After a moment: “No, not a hairpin! Good Lord, Kitty. You’ll pop the baby like a bubble. Use a spring pin.”
Kitty’s laughter sounded again, much like a bubble itself. Audrina’s step faltered. This is what he’s like with his sisters. This is what he gave up to come here.
America seemed farther away than ever.
But the pantry, as Giles had promised, was quite close, and it was there that she must turn her thoughts. Resolutely. Immediately.
Although a small room tucked behind the servants’ stairs, the pantry and larder were cleverly arranged to use every bit of wall space and even some of the awkward triangular cubby beneath the stairs. She looked over wooden shelves of jarred and preserved foods, a butter churn, apples and root vegetables in barrels, wheels of cheese, cones of sugar.
Cold nipped her nose, and she tied the apron on over her gown in a hurry. She would come back with a measure once she decided how much bread to make. While the dough rose, though, perhaps a treat? It was too late by a month to start on a Christmas pudding, but she thought she could remember how to make apple tarts. With mulled wine, that would give their evening a festive air. She piled a dozen apples into her apron, then, shivering, darted back into the kitchen.
Kitty had gone, and Giles was removing the makeshift diaper from the vegetable marrow. “What are your plans for the morning, princess?”
“I told Mrs. Booth I would bake something.”
The smile that spread over his face was warm and secret, quite different from the mischievous look he’d worn with Kitty. “Will you really? Good for you. No one to chase you from this kitchen.”
“There’s no one to work in this kitchen at all today, except for Mrs. Booth.” Audrina hitched up the apron to the level of the huge wooden table and let the apples roll out. “And me.”
“And me, if you like.”
“You? Really? It is even worse for a man to work in a kitchen than an earl’s daughter.”
“Then we won’t call it work. This is pure pleasure.” He winked at her.
Shrugging free of his coat, he added, “You’ve got an apron as big as Yorkshire, but I have to protect my clothing somehow. Can you find me a knife? I’ll start peeling those apples.”
“But your hands—” She bit down hard on the end of that phrase.
Giles shot her a Look as he hung his coat on the apron hook. “My hands are fine. They’ve been well-rested for a few days and they’re not too painful. Nor are they clockwork machines that wind down and stop working. I can use them even if they hurt.”
Audrina found him a small paring knife and herself a larger one. “I did not mean to insult you, Giles. Only to let you know that I don’t want you to be hurt. Not for something so frivolous as apple tarts.”
I care about you. But now I am embarrassed to have revealed as much.
“That’s a compliment indeed.” He set the knife tip near the top of one apple, then sliced free a long, tidy curl of blush-red peel. “But if there’s anything worth hurting one’s hands for, it’s an apple tart.”
It’s fine. We don’t have to talk about it anymore.
So much of a conversation bobbed below the surface.
As Giles peeled the apples, Audrina tried not to stare at the flex of his shirt-sleeved arms.
Instead, she made herself familiar with the kitchen. The floor was made of large flags of native stone. One wall was taken up by a fireplace large enough to roast a calf, though fortunately a modern oven was set into the brickwork. Clean sand scattered about the hearth would catch drippings and ash. An ironwork rack held bowls and serving dishes and—aha!—the blobby leavings of the last baking, well covered in flour to preserve it for leavening the next baking. Thank goodness. Audrina had a vague idea of how to start a loaf from a slurry of yeast, but sourdough would be much easier.
As she collected what she needed, she felt Giles’s gaze following her—though every time she looked at him, he was studying another long curl of apple peel as he sliced it free. “You know, princess, you don’t have to make bread any more than I have to peel these apples.”
Oh. She must have been frowning as she hunted for supplies. “I’m all right. I was just making my looking-for-things face.”
Giles smiled. “If you say so.”
“Why are you peeling the apples, then?” she asked.
“Why are you making the bread?”
“Because someone needs to, and I know how.”
He shrugged. “Likewise.”
He was peeling each apple so deftly, his strong fingers playing over fruit and knife. His gaze was focused, as if for this moment there was nothing in the world but this apple peel to be removed. Audrina envied that attention, that determined focus.
She was feeling jealous of an apple.
“You could at least say you craved my company,” she said. “To be polite.”
“I thought that was a given.” He set down the apple and knife, then looked her full in the face. “And I don’t mean my politeness.”
The craving. She flushed, pleased.
He smiled again—not the wicked grin, but rather a sweet one. And then neither of them seemed to know what to say.
After a moment, he returned to his work. He’d lined up five neatly peeled apples, with seven more to go. “Since you’re the polite one,” he said, “you could politely praise me now. I’m doing an excellent job and I want you to know it and prove to me that you know it.”
She laughed. “You are doing an excellent job. I know it. Thank you.”
“Much obliged.” He lined up the sixth peeled apple. “And now it’s your turn to receive some gratitude. Thank you for doing the baking. It’s kind of you.”
The thought of the garter hidden in her chamber—a frail scandal in the making—weighed so heavily that her smile fell; her spirits lowered. She could only shake her head.
She counted out fistfuls of flour, then set them to rise in a bowl with warm water and a lump of the leaven-dough.
His knife went still in apple number seven. “What, you can thank me but I can’t thank you?”
“It’s not worth thanking me,” she mumbled. “I needed something to do. I am not making bread out of kindness.”
“Just the apple tart, then?”
She shook her head again, covering the bowl with a cloth and setting it at the corner of the wooden table nearest the fireplace. There the air was pleasantly warm, and the leaven would rise until tomorrow morning. Then she could finish mixing the dough, and they would have fresh loaves for Christmas. For dinner today they would have to make do with the remainder of yesterday’s bread.
She picked up the larger knife, along with the first in Giles’s line of peeled apples.
He took the stem of an unpeeled apple between thumb and forefinger, rolling it in a gentle arc before him. “I wonder what you know about gratitude, princess.”
Chock. She split the apple in half with a determined blow of the knife. “No more or less than any woman in my position, I suppose.”
“And how much is that?”
Her head snapped up. “Don’t you have apples to peel?”
“I can peel and talk at the same time.” Something in the blandness of his smile reminded her of his unflappable father. “So. How much is that?”
Chock. She quartered the apple. “I don’t know. Not as much as I should, probably. My parents never bothered to hide that they wished I had been a boy, and I did not think I had much to be grateful for as the unwanted youngest of five daughters.”
He began to peel the next apple. “Nor I as the oldest in a large family. The weight of expectations can be heavy.”
“Is it better to be burdened with heavy expectations, or none?” When she met his blue eyes across the table, something within her quailed.
“I don’t know.” He slipped free one cuff link, then the other. After tucking them in his waistcoat pocket, he rolled his sleeves up his forearms. “With the former, someone’s sure to be disappointed. With the latter, maybe they already are.”
Cold sunlight picked out the golden hairs on his forearms, corded and firm with muscle. His strong fingers handled the knife with dexterity. Such hands were made to create beauty in gold or stone—or out of nothing but an apple peeling.
A shudder shook her at the memory of those fingers caressing her breasts, cradling her face as though she was worth more than she had ever imagined. The sort of person you are, you need never change.
How had he described her worth? Worth different. Not more or less. Just . . . different.
She was different from the docile daughter her parents had wanted her to be; she was certainly different from the son they would have preferred. She was different from the grateful whore Llewellyn seemed to think her.
But what was she instead? And what place was there for her in the world, if she was not what her parents or suitors wanted?
She had no answers to these questions. “There is no maybe about the disappointment inevitably involved in expectations.” Chock. The knife made a satisfying sound on the wooden table.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s inevitable. I expect these apple tarts to be delicious.”
She pressed at her temple with the back of her wrist, then cut another apple. “That is hardly a credit to me. If someone shows me what to do, I can repeat the process. I’m not unobservant. Nor unintelligent.”
“So you tell me what you’re not.” He leaned forward across the table. “Can you say it the other way ’round? ‘Giles, I am observant. Giles, I am intelligent.’”
Her throat caught.
She was so afraid, yet he had called her brave. She didn’t know what to do, yet he called her intelligent. And she didn’t know what to call him in return, what to call the feeling for him that was growing warmly about her heart.
Chock. “Giles, I have apple tarts to make.” She pressed her lips together so they would say no more; she fixed her gaze on the table so he would not see her eyes grow damp.
“That’s all you have to say? Really?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “All right, have it your way.” One last apple, peeled with perfect neatness, rolled across the table into her field of vision.
“I didn’t have to peel the apples, princess. But I wanted to. I wanted to help you and spend a few minutes with you.” She heard his footsteps cross the flagged floor, the shush of cloth as he pulled his coat from the hook. “Why do you do the things that you do?”
She waited, still and poised until he left. As soon as she was alone, she wiped her eyes on the apron, then went back to slicing the apples.
Chock. Chock.
With Giles gone, there was no satisfaction in the sound.