Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
If you ain’t going to eat, give a man warning so he don’t waste time in the kitchen.” Harley yanked a plate away.
I should hire a real cook, Andrew thought. Work absorbed Andrew for the first six weeks since Georgiana had dumped work in his lap and left. He forgot about cooks until now.
“Take it back, Harley. Bread and cheese will do.”
“Fine then. Them I can buy. No need to muss the pots.”
Or burn the pots. Andrew would fetch lunch at one of the little coffee shops tomorrow, if he felt like eating.
Harley dropped plates in a dry sink. Andrew ignored lunch; he ignored Harley, and he ignored muffled banging in front of his house.
Georgiana’s last letter lay spread out on the worn table. She sent two short cryptic notes during her journey to Mountview after Chadbourn’s wedding, each scribbled out in haste in a moving carriage. They looked it.
Muffled voices floated into the kitchen with the scent of rain. Andrew cursed the date on the last letter, three weeks past. Damned woman gets to Mountview, and she forgets the work. She forgets me. He tipped the paper toward the window light.
Harley’s voice sounded more irritable than usual. Andrew reread the letter, looking for something personal. There was none.
Chadbourn and his countess (Will’s beloved!) are four days gone on their wedding journey, and the Hayden caravan makes its way to Mountview in slow stages.
Georgiana consistently referred to the young woman as “Will’s beloved.” The Earl must be besotted. He had hoped Georgiana was as envious as she sounded. Three weeks without word made him less confident. He should have gone to the wedding. Will would have welcomed him.
“Sorry to barge in. Not the way for a proper call.” Geoff Dunning stood in the doorway. Rain dripped down his neck and onto the shoulders of his professorial gown.
“Not at all. Delighted to see you!” The delight was genuine.
Dunning had promised to hint to Wallace Selby that Andrew waited for more work.
He had nothing else to do. The poetry and commentary had been assembled into a manuscript.
It wanted only his partner’s review and comment.
Andrew desperately needed work, something to keep his mind off Georgiana.
“You have work for me?” he asked.
Dunning took the seat Harley offered. “Hot tea wouldn’t go awry,” he said with a twisted smile to Harley. “Beastly out.”
Harley grunted and put the kettle on to boil.
“Sorry, Dunning. It must be urgent to drive you out on an afternoon like this.” Andrew’s eyes continued to scan Georgiana’s letter. She wrote, “I am expected to stay until Lady Day, if not longer.”
Lady Day—the March quarter day—another six weeks!
“Not urgent. Going to Gran’s for early supper.”
Andrew forced his attention to Dunning. “Your Grandmother’s? Good of you to stop by.”
“Thought you should know soonest.” Dunning’s neck shown red in spite of the cold rain.
The misery of his expression made Andrew go as cold as the rain. “Know what?” he asked cautiously.
“There won’t be work. Sorry to be blunt.” Dunning looked away, embarrassed.
“Mallet? Do you hear? Can’t dress it up for you. No more work.” Dunning’s distress increased.
“No work?” Andrew repeated. He looked for misunderstanding. Dunning looked steadily back. There was no misunderstanding, and there would be no work.
“You had better tell me all of it,” Andrew said.
Dunning did. He left nothing out, not even the color of Selby’s face when indignant—puce. “Murchison wasn’t indignant. Fairly gloated. He...”
“Murchison? What did that slimy specimen have to do with it?”
“Didn’t I say? That was the worst of it.” Dunning reached up gratefully and took a mug of tea from Harley. “He’s taken on an assistant. ‘An assistant,’ Selby called him!” Now Dunning looked indignant.
“Murchison? He took on Murchison?”
“Man’s a fool, Mallet. Can’t see a grasping mushroom when one ripens in front of him.”
Bile curdled in Andrew’s belly. Murchison. He wanted to cast up his accounts on the tabletop. “Tell me again exactly what he said. Selby I mean, not that snake Murchison.”
Dunning breathed deeply, “I don’t see how it would help.”
“Tell me again. Exactly.”
“‘Can’t have my reputation sullied. I worked long and hard for it. If the man can’t keep his mind above trivia, he shall not be part of my great work.’” Dunning mimicked Selby. He repeated, “‘My great work.’ Prancing pony thinks he’s Plato himself.”
“Trivia?”
“Praxilla. Can’t say how he found out. Old Featheringham perhaps.”
“Murchison.”
“How’s that?”
“Murchison,” Andrew repeated with greater confidence. “I saw him at the library that day. He must have bribed Featheringham.”
“Just the sort to do it. Lots of the lazy ones think they can get librarians to do their work for them.” Dunning’s brow furrowed. “Sorry, Mallet. Selby’s a prig.”
“Tell me again what he said.”
“Which thing? Took an assistant?”
“The rest. Did he really call Praxilla trivial?”
“Puce. Turned puce at the thought.”
Murderous rage froze Andrew with ice-cold intensity. Selby dismissed five months of Andrew’s work and ten years of Georgiana’s life as trivia. Hands clenched as if to squeeze the puce neck of the arrogant old windbag.
Three hours later Andrew remembered Georgiana’s letter, carried it to the study, and lay it next to the completed manuscript.
Rereading it didn’t improve the words. “It will be more difficult to correspond from Mountview.” she had written. She should have said “impossible.” The duchess, that scorpion, has had her in her poisonous clutches for weeks.
“These are the last of the translations,” she wrote. Georgiana declared the translations finished. Andrew thought of the commentaries. His parts were complete, but they needed her approval.
He read the next line. “The work approaches an end, and that saddens me.” Saddens her? He almost choked on his anger. The end of their partnership loomed in front of him, and all she had to say was that it saddened her?
She told him they would talk when the work was done. It was done, and yet she stayed at Mountview.
Damn it woman, what do you want from me?
He could do nothing without further word from Georgiana. Now he had no work from Selby either, nothing to banish Georgiana’s ghost, the ghost that paced his book-lined study, gesticulating and peppering him with questions.
Andrew poured brandy in a glass and drank it down to banish the image, and another image replaced it—Georgiana looking sidelong at his bedroom with another question in her eyes.
Andrew commanded men. He bent unruly partisans to do England’s bidding.
He outwitted two French colonels and survived the hell of interrogation with honor intact, but he couldn’t bend Georgiana.
He couldn’t even write to her. She was at Mountview, and he sat like a pensioner waiting some scrap of attention from Lady Bountiful.
I’ll be damned if I sit here any longer and wait while her miserable family finds excuses to isolate her again. Only one choice remained.
“Harley! You rogue, get up here. We need to pack.”
* * *
“On the contrary. She is lovely, and quite articulate.”
Georgiana’s words echoed through the Hayden family’s massive dining room. Utter silence greeted it. She regretted the urge to defend Chadbourn’s bride from the vicious description her sister had just spewed. Chadbourn’s countess didn’t need her defense, and it had no impact in any case.
Her Grace the Duchess of Sudbury paid Georgiana no heed.
A faint pursing of lips was the only indication that she had heard.
She nodded to a footman to serve the evening’s pudding, a fine cake with a hot caramel sauce, appropriate for the end of winter.
She turned to Eloise, as though Georgiana hadn’t spoken.
“You couldn’t be more correct. The woman is utterly common, not one trace of grace.
The entire wedding was an ordeal.” Her fat little hand, heavy with rings, lifted an excessively ornate silver spoon, signaling to the others that they might commence as well.
His Grace, regal in habitual silence, sat in the great carved chair at the head of the table.
He ignored the women’s conversation. Glenaire, the heir, on His Grace’s left, took his cues from his father.
Georgiana sat adrift in the middle and wondered what Glenaire found to occupy his mind during these interminable dinners. She thought she ought to ask him, as she could use help learning the skill.
Her mind drifted back to Chadbourn’s lovely wedding, and she felt sympathy for the new countess. No, not sympathy. Envy. The bride and groom had glowed with love for one another, and the woman didn’t need Georgiana or anyone’s support.
“One needed to attend, of course.” Georgiana’s mother droned on. “Her Grace of Murnane would invite the world to her brother’s wedding, and one could not refuse. How she could lend countenance to the bride I do not know?”
“His sister genuinely likes his bride, Mother. Imagine it.” Georgiana pointed out. She moved her spoon through the caramel with aimless motions. No one took note of her comment. I am invisible again, she thought.
“Perhaps you needed to attend, but really, Your Grace, was it necessary to involve Ardmore and me?” At twenty-nine, Eloise already wore her mother’s habitual sour expression.
“Attending simply lowered oneself.” Eloise’s petulant voice clashed with her fine lace dinner dress.
She looked as if she had encountered an insect in her soup.
It might have done Eloise good to have actually talked to the woman, Georgiana thought. She put her spoon down, appetite fled.
“Chadbourn always tended to be a bit déclassé—as was his father before him. The man practically doted on his children.” The Duchess sniffed as she spoke.