Chapter 15
The smell of vinegar and soot clung to the air long after the worst of the mess was gone. Isla wrung out the cloth over a bucket gone grey with dirt and ash. Her shoulders burned.
Somewhere behind her, a chair scraped as it was pushed aside to make room for a broom. It then rasped over floorboards. The study of her brother’s house no longer looked like a battlefield. It resembled, just barely, a room used by human beings rather than a pack of drunken wolves.
Alistair snored softly in the corner, slumped on the sagging sofa where they had heaved him an hour ago. A blanket covered him to the waist. His hand still curled loosely as if around a glass.
“Leave him,” Edward had said. “If he rolls off, he deserves the floor.”
They had not left him. Isla had insisted on the blanket.
Edward had rolled his eyes and fetched it.
She straightened slowly, pressing her hand into the small of her back.
Alistair had retained one maid, a cook and a scullery boy.
The maid and the boy had been sent away half an hour ago at Isla’s insistence.
They had both had been dead on their feet doing the work of ten and terrified of their employer’s drunken rage beside.
Now the candles in the hall had been extinguished.
Only the downstairs rooms still held light.
Somewhere a clock chimed ten with a dull, apologetic tone.
In the doorway Edward appeared, collar open, coat discarded somewhere upstairs, shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms. Dust streaked one cheek.
A faint smear of ash ran along the back of his hand.
He looked tired, the way a man looks when the day has taken more from him than he cares to admit.
“That is the last of the glass from under the desk,” he said. “Your brother will cut his own throat on it if he goes looking for another bottle.”
“Good,” Isla said. “He deserves the inconvenience.”
She dropped the cloth into the bucket and flexed her fingers. The nails, once carefully cleaned by Moira before she left Scotland, were now rimmed with black. She did not mind.
Dirt from honest work bothered her less than the polished dust of rooms no one dared to disturb.
Edward surveyed the room. Papers had been stacked into neat piles, charred edges trimmed and removed.
Bottles, empty and otherwise, had been banished to the scullery.
The candle had been replaced, its holder anchored safely on the mantlepiece, out of reach of wayward arms.
“It will do,” he said quietly. “For a night.”
She nodded. Weariness crept over her all at once, a soft, heavy cloak. “I am for the kitchens. I shall fall upon whatever Alistair has left in there.”
“Cook left an hour ago,” Edward said. “She declared there was nothing more worth saving but the house and her temper.”
“Then we shall raid her stores,” Isla said, lifting her chin. “My brother may drown in brandy. I mean to drown in tea.”
The kitchen lay at the back of the house, down a narrow stair that smelled of coal and cabbage.
It was dim and strangely peaceful after the chaos upstairs.
The great range glowed low, embers breathed gently behind the iron door.
Copper pots hung in orderly ranks along the far wall.
A large scrubbed table sat squarely in the middle, solid and indifferent.
No one else remained. The scullery boy had been sent to his cot. Cook had indeed departed, leaving her world in reasonable order. Edward went at once to the dresser, opening and shutting drawers with the cautious determination of a man faced with an unfamiliar battlefield.
“Tea,” he muttered. “There must be some. It is illegal, I believe, to run a London household without it.”
“There,” Isla said, pointing to the blue canister on the second shelf.
He ignored her and opened a jar of sugar. Then a tin of salt. Then something that, from his expression, contained suet.
“Edward,” she said.
He opened the spice drawer and frowned at the riot of labels. “Isla.”
“Move.” She came round the table, nudged him gently aside with her hip, and plucked the proper canister from its place. “You are at sea here.”
“It is not my usual province,” he admitted.
“A kitchen?”
“A house where the servants have not put everything directly into my hands for the last thirty years.”
She snorted softly. “You are hopeless. However did you manage at sea?”
“Because ordinary seamen put everything in my hands instead of servants. Much the same thing.”
She smiled despite the ache in her chest. The familiarity of the work soothed.
The kettle was filled from the pump and set over the fire.
Cups were located in a lower cupboard and bread discovered under a clean cloth, still soft from earlier baking.
There was cheese, and a heel of ham. It took her no time at all to assemble a meal on two mismatched plates.
Edward watched as if she were performing a small, mild magic.
“You have done this before,” he said.
“Every day before you met me,” she said. “Moira would have had my head if I could not lay a simple tea. We had staff, but not enough to grow lazy.”
“And Strathmore?” he asked, lifting a brow. “Did he not feel it beneath his dignity to pass you a knife?”
“Oh, he would pass me a knife emphatically when I tried to take his plate before he had finished,” she said. “Not quite the same thing.”
The kettle began to hum. She poured, the kitchen filling with the familiar scent of leaves and comfort. When she placed the cup in front of him, his shoulders dropped a fraction as he wrapped his fingers around the warmth.
They sat side by side on the long bench, not opposite. It happened naturally. The table was pushed against the wall opposite the range, and there was more light on that side. Still, Isla felt the choice when their elbows came within easy reach of touching.
Edward sprawled, without quite meaning to.
One leg stretched out under the table, crossing the other at the ankle.
His shirt pulled slightly across his shoulders as he settled.
He looked, in that moment, utterly unlike the polished duke at Wexford or the sharp officer in a storm. He looked like a man simply worn out.
Isla sat stiffly erect at first, cup held in both hands, eyes fixed on the steam.
It took a few sips before the hot liquid began to thaw the knot in her throat.
They ate and drank in easy silence at first. It was the kind of food that cared nothing for titles.
Candlelight burned low in a stubby pair on the table, throwing long shadows and turning the edges of the room into soft obscurity.
Isla shifted her foot to plant it more comfortably. Her toe brushed his boot.
She froze. So did he. The contact was small, leather against leather but the awareness of it spread up her leg in a slow, undeniable line.
She ought to have whispered an apology, moved away, reasserted the careful distance they had been so determined to maintain.
She did not move. He did not, either. The pressure remained, slight but constant.
Not pressing. Simply there. A point of quiet connection under the table where no one could see.
Edward set his empty cup down. “You were born in Perthshire,” he said, as if the question had been turning over in his mind for some time. “Near the seat?”
“Aye.” The word slipped out before she remembered to temper it for London. She smiled faintly. “Yes. Strathmore sits in the lowlands, but the Highlands breathe down its neck. You cannot call yourself a Lowlander with a straight face when the glens stare at you from the window.”
“Tell me,” he said.
She turned her head to look at him properly. “About what?”
“About Strathmore. About Perthshire. About the place that has you looking like …” He stopped, searching for a word that would not sound dangerously like admiration. “… like you have lost more than stone and timber in that fire.”
Her throat tightened again. She swallowed it down. Talking was better than imagining smoke curling under doors and around the portraits in the great hall.
“The hills go on forever,” she said slowly. “Rolling and then suddenly sharp, folding in on themselves in ways that never sit still. You think you know a path and then you turn a corner and the whole land has changed its mind.”
He listened, turned slightly toward her now, his cup forgotten.
“In winter,” she went on, “the snow lies like a blessing and a warning. You cannot tell where the road ends and the moor begins, so you learn to trust the line of a fence, the shape of a tree. The woods …” She smiled, far away.
“We had a stand of old pines in one valley. Moira swore the trees moved at night. That they shifted closer to the house when the wind blew from the east, listening for gossip.”
“And did they?” he asked.
“They creaked gossip,” she said. “That is near enough.”
He huffed a small laugh.
“There are burns,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment to see it properly, “that cut through the land so cleanly you can hear the water from half a mile away but not see it until you are on the edge, looking down into the rocks where it has carved its home. Children learn early not to run ahead in those places. My knee has scars enough.”
He glanced, involuntarily, at the skirts that hid those knees. “You fell?”
“I climbed,” she said. “And the rock disagreed.”
Her foot pressed, just a fraction more firmly, against his. Not deliberately. Simply because the memory had moved her, and her body moved with it. His boot did not retreat.