Chapter 14
April 20, 1803
It was dark before Clara and Caelan finished washing dishes, making up the narrow bed meant for a nanny, and heating a pitcher of water. She was so exhausted that she washed without thinking twice about the prince, putting on one of Caelan’s dingy-but-clean shirts and falling promptly into dreamless sleep.
She was awakened by a voice. “Mrs. Potts?”
“Who?”
Clara asked, sitting up.
Sunlight was pouring into the room. The young woman standing at her bedside had a sharply pointed chin and a bright smile. “I’m Elsbeth, ma’am, Mr. Cobbledick’s daughter.”
“Good morning,”
Clara said groggily. “Thank you for agreeing to be my maid.”
Elsbeth bobbed a curtsy. “I was grateful to escape that household.”
She grimaced. “I don’t know what an upstairs maid does, my lady—I mean, Mrs. Potts.”
“First of all, you must call me Clara. I’m not really Mrs. Potts.”
“I know that, my lady.”
Elsbeth gave her a shy smile. “My father told me.”
“Please don’t tell anyone. The most important thing about a lady’s personal maid is that she knows everything. All the secrets. And she never shares, not even with her father.”
Elsbeth nodded earnestly.
Clara could feel her curls billowing around her head as she moved to the edge of the bed and swung her legs over the side. “I’m sure my hair is frightful.”
“It’s not like hair I’ve ever seen before,”
Elsbeth said carefully. “Have you tried braiding it at night?”
Clara felt a pang of embarrassment. “I don’t know how. All the way from London, it’s become worse and worse. My maid had a salve that she rubbed into it, but it must have been left behind.”
“You’re a proper lady, aren’t you? Like in a play. My father said as much, but I couldn’t see a lady taking up a position as a housekeeper.”
Elsbeth lowered her voice. “Let alone in this castle.”
“It’s more accurate to say that I was a lady, but now I’m an adventurer. And temporarily a housekeeper. What do you mean by this castle?”
“The state of it,”
Elsbeth said. “I’d heard tell. My father is downstairs talking to the laird. He scowled something fierce when he saw the kitchen, and I think he’d prefer to take us away, though the laird says you’re staying until the bathtub is delivered.”
“We washed the crockery last night, but—”
“We?”
“The laird helped.”
Elsbeth’s eyes were as big as sovereigns. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
Clara shrugged. “He’s hardly a gentleman. Why should I treat him as such? A gentleman would not live in a pigsty.”
“I take it that shirt you’re wearing is his,”
Elsbeth said, nodding. “It’s dingy, and the cuffs are frayed. Fred brought up your trunk, by the way. It’s on the landing.”
“Let’s pull it in. For today, I’ll wear a traveling gown, and we can bind up my hair in a scarf, because I must tackle this pigsty. If you were a proper lady’s maid, you would be very offended by this question, but seeing as you are not, do you know anything about cleaning?”
“I’m not offended! I like cleaning.”
“Marvelous. Then we can do it together,”
Clara said, feeling rather faint at the idea of the work awaiting them downstairs. “The laird said that a scullery maid would join us.”
“Cleaning is easy. Taming your hair, though?”
“You’re eyeing me as if I have a live animal on my head.”
Elsbeth giggled, not denying it.
They bound up her hair in a white lace fichu, winding and pinning until an unsteady mound balanced on top of Clara’s head. “This way it won’t collect dust,”
she said, wiggling it from side to side. “More to the point, I won’t terrify the scullery maid.”
“Do you want to carry a reticule?”
Elsbeth asked, holding up a cat. “Are these the fashion in London?”
“No, I just enjoy making them.”
The maid turned the small bag over in her hands. “It’s adorable. You could sell these in Edinburgh.”
“Housekeepers carry keys, not reticules,”
Clara announced. “As it is, I suspect that I don’t resemble any housekeeper you’ve seen.”
“No,”
Elsbeth agreed. “But then, you aren’t a housekeeper.”
“When your father returns, we shall leave and find a castle to buy.”
Elsbeth’s eyes widened. “A castle?”
“Growing up, I dreamed of living in a castle,”
Clara confessed. “They’re few and far between in England, but we passed masses of them on the way here.”
“Like a fairy tale,”
Elsbeth said, nodding.
“Hopefully without an ogre inside, but yes.”
Clara felt enormously relieved. Hortense’s propensity to lose her temper and offer critical—if honest—comments had made Clara wary and even a little afraid of her own maid, but Elsbeth was obviously kind.
“I think we’ll get along well,”
Clara said, and Elsbeth’s grin was as large as her own.
Downstairs there was no sign of Caelan or Mr. Cobbledick.
“First we must have breakfast and tea,”
Clara said. Thankfully, the coals just needed a poke to bring the kettle back to a boil, and there was still food left in the basket. She and Elsbeth ate at the stone table.
“It’s a shame to ruin those pretty gloves by cleaning,”
Elsbeth said as they rose from breakfast.
Clara looked down at her brown suede gloves with fringes. “Sacrifices must be made.”
“You could simply wash your hands,”
Elsbeth said, a somewhat admonishing tone in her voice.
“That’s true! I have to get used to not being a lady.”
Clara stripped off her gloves.
“You’ll always be a lady. You can’t escape it. We said that the laird isn’t a gentleman, but that isn’t true. Even in that terrible shirt, he still looks like a laird. There’s something about him, and you too.”
Caelan did have an intrinsic air of . . . of command. And decency. It didn’t matter if his shirt was grimy and his castle nigh uninhabitable.
“Though the laird isn’t like any gentleman I’ve seen,”
Elsbeth said, reversing herself.
“My father would have had a heart attack if he hadn’t been served a proper breakfast with a butler and at least one footman in attendance,”
Clara agreed.
Elsbeth nodded. “The master I had in Edinburgh had a fry-up every morning.”
Her eyes darkened a little. “Along with too many mugs of beer. It pickled his brain. That’s what the cook reckoned.”
Just then, Caelan stuck his head out of the kitchen. Clara and Elsbeth both curtsied. “Good morning, laird,”
she said, smiling.
He froze for a moment, then strode over and grabbed a hunk of bread. “Morning.”
Clara swatted his hip. “His lordship is supposed to eat in splendid solitude. We were planning to serve you a withered carrot in your study, since the dining room is uninhabitable.”
Caelan showed no sign of being insulted by her impulsive gesture, since he rolled his eyes at her.
“Mr. Cobbledick is waiting to say goodbye to you, Elsbeth,”
he said. “You’ll be boarding with the new scullery maid, as your father is worried about the proximity of stable lads.”
Whereas Clara could sleep alone because she was married. Supposedly.
“I’ll be in the study if you need me.”
Caelan grabbed another piece of bread and a chicken leg and walked back into the castle.
Mr. Cobbledick was waiting for them, leaning against the coach with his arms crossed over his chest, his mustache looking particularly fierce.
“I’ll handle this,”
Elsbeth said. She marched right up to her father and said, “We’re staying until you return with the bathtub, and that’s that.”
“I don’t like it,”
he barked. “The place is filthy.”
“We shall clean it,”
Clara told him. “We already cleaned some last night.”
“Aye, the laird told me as much.”
He scowled at her. “Ladies don’t clean.”
“I do,”
Clara said stoutly.
“She can if she wants to,”
Elsbeth chimed in.
“Why aren’t you wearing gloves?”
he demanded.
“Because I can wash my hands afterwards. I don’t have to have lily-white hands.”
“I told her that,”
Elsbeth said with satisfaction.
“I don’t hold with the idea of a lady working for a living. It’s not right.”
“He’s not paying me,”
Clara said.
“Then why are you cleaning his castle?”
“Because he needs help. His wife died, and the brambles grew, and the castle fell to pieces, and he needs help.”
Mr. Cobbledick groaned. “You’ve talked yourself into one of those novels you’re always telling me about, haven’t you?”
“Maybe,”
Clara said, giving him a big smile. “Keep your eye out for a castle that I could buy, won’t you? I’d like one like this: not too big, and not too small.”
He opened his mouth again, but Clara gave him a look. She’d made up her mind, and that was that. After the carriage rumbled out the gate, she led the way back into the kitchen.
“I suppose we should begin by taking stock of what needs to be done. The moss on the floor will have to be scraped off,”
Clara said, poking at it with the stick end of a broom.
“This pot seems clean,”
Elsbeth said, peering into the fireplace.
“I scrubbed that yesterday. Did you see that set of bell pulls by that wall?”
Three ragged rope ends emerged from holes drilled into the mortar. Tarnished brass plates beneath them read Butler, Housekeeper, Kitchen. Elsbeth darted out the door to take a look and reported, “They go into a lead pipe and then under the flagstones and probably ring in the other tower.”
Clara tried pulling one, but neither of them heard a bell. “We’ll ignore that tower for the moment,”
she decided. “I’ll heat water.”
“I’ll sweep the floor.”
Elsbeth took the broom and headed for the pile of cabbage leaves.
Whereupon she met the rat who’d made it his home.
He was clearly terrified by having his leafy home swept away. He turned around, looking for an exit, his tail whipping after him, but Clara was standing between him and the door into the courtyard.
Elsbeth squealed, but Clara had more powerful lungs.
Upstairs in his study, Caelan leapt from his chair. Damn it, Clara’s sodding husband must have made his appearance. He threw himself down the steps—
No man, noble, married, or otherwise.
The new maid was standing on a rickety chair, and Clara was waving a broom at the corner. “Caelan, what do we do about this animal?”
she said, not turning around.
He walked over to take a look. The rat had pressed his plump body into the corner. If he had been human, he’d have had his eyes squeezed shut. Caelan put an arm around Clara’s waist and placed her gently behind him.
“Don’t kill him!”
she cried.
Bloody hell.
Behind him, Mrs. Gillan walked into the kitchen, followed by a scullery maid who—as it turned out—had as fine a set of lungs as could be found anywhere in the Highlands.
Caelan caught the sluggish rat by the tail and carried it past the shrieking women to the front door, transporting it over the moat and then tossing it into the grass, where it scrambled away. He stopped to have a word with Mr. Gillan, who was leaning against his carriage, peacefully smoking a pipe.
“As you see, we had a rat.”
“Aye, I thought it’d be something like that,”
his father-in-law said around his pipe. “Apologies if the missus fusses at you about marrying again. She was up half the night thinking about it. Finding you a spouse has given her a new lease on life.”
Caelan nodded and raised the question of Young Ross’s unpaid multure. As the head of the local burgh council, Mr. Gillan knew everything that happened in Lavenween.
“You might remember that his wife had a glad eye,”
Gillan said, knocking his pipe against a carriage wheel.
“Aye,”
Caelan agreed. Mrs. Ross had “tripped” and thrown herself into Caelan’s arms a few months after Isla’s death.
“Two weeks ago, she stole away with a traveling knife grinder. Young Ross has been spending all his time down at the pub. If his brother didn’t go over and feed the animals, they would have starved in their pens.”
A broken man, in other words.
Back in the castle, Caelan found the women had retreated from the kitchen to the courtyard. He stifled a grin on discovering his temporary housekeeper at the head of the stone table, pouring tea as elegantly as if she were in a duchess’s parlor.
Mrs. Gillan announced, “We are discussing how to tackle the kitchen. Quite naturally, Mrs. Potts has no experience with a task of this magnitude.”
His mother-in-law’s glare clearly blamed him for the sad state of Isla’s castle, as she liked to call it.
He had a daft impulse to walk over and stand behind Clara, then put a hand on her shoulder until she smiled up at him, and he could be certain that Mrs. Gillan wasn’t babbling about Isla.
Even more daft: he’d like to kiss her good morning. Instead he leaned against the wall and enjoyed looking at her, even with a tangle of lace covering her hair.
“Have you washed your hands after touching that rat?”
Clara asked, narrowing her eyes at him. Kissing was obviously not foremost in her mind.
“I have.”
“Market is held on Tuesday,”
Mrs. Gillan said, ignoring him. “You and Elsbeth will join me for coffee thereafter. You’ll enjoy that. Bring your needlework.”
“Me?”
Clara asked. “With you, Mrs. Gillan?”
“All the village women come, and we do our mending. I’m afraid you’ll find there’s much to be mended in the castle.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Gillan. I want to show you something.”
Elsbeth jumped up and ran back into the castle, and Caelan heard her dashing up the steps.
“I shall return with two more maids to assist you in the Herculean task that awaits,”
Mrs. Gillan said. She turned to Caelan with a frown. “I too have been grieving, laird, but I did not neglect my household. I thought the rumors about the state of the castle had been exaggerated.”
“Sadly, vermin can be found in every kitchen in London,”
Clara said.
Was she defending him?
“Nay, this castle is infamous,”
Mrs. Gillan retorted. “Didn’t you wonder why you were hired from England? It’s because the laird’s own sister knew that no good Scotswoman would take on the task—not unless they were hoping to marry him.” Her chin trembled. “Thank goodness my Isla can’t see what’s become of this place. She took such pride in her castle.” She blotted a tear.
Caelan couldn’t muster up a guilty expression, because he simply didn’t feel the emotion.
Elsbeth ran back into the courtyard waving two small bags, the kind ladies carried to balls. “Look at these bonnie wee bags, Mrs. Gillan! Mrs. Potts made them with her own hands.”
They were far better than the bejeweled French reticules that Isla had collected. Now he thought of it, those bags disappeared along with his wife’s personal maid, who left the day after she died.
“Is that a mouse?”
Mrs. Gillan asked, looking taken aback.
“Mayhap you can make a special rat for wearing around the castle,”
Caelan suggested.
Clara rolled her eyes at him.
“I wouldn’t mind a cat,”
Mrs. Gillan said, turning it over. “I must be off home. Seeing Isla’s castle in this state is breaking my heart.” Her eyes welled up, and she took out a handkerchief.
Clara gently helped her to rise. “We’d be grateful if you could send maids to help, but you must stay home and put up your feet. Next time you see the castle, I promise that it will shine from the parapet to the kitchen. Does your housekeeper know how to make a posset of calf’s-foot jelly? It would be very sustaining for you at this difficult time.”
“I don’t think she does,”
Mrs. Gillan replied. “I can see that you’re used to the very best households, as you’re wearing such beautiful lace on your head. I’m ashamed of Isla’s home.”
“It will be clean in no time,”
Clara said soothingly.
“Her linens were her pride and joy,”
she said, with a sob.
They walked past Caelan without a second glance, Clara’s voice receding as they moved down the corridor and out the castle.
Now a good half of Scotland would think not only that he’d fallen on his wife’s grave but also that he was so grief-stricken as to live in filth.
“Me and Maisie will be at it now, laird.”
Elsbeth stood up and curtsied, and then yanked the scullery maid to her feet. Clara’s maid was clearly a force to be reckoned with, unsurprising after meeting her father. Cobbledick had demanded a tour of the staff’s living quarters before he would consider parting from his daughter; thankfully the rat hadn’t yet made its presence known.
Before he left, the coachman had served up a homily on the importance of a woman’s virtue, by which Caelan understood that Cobbledick, like him, had concluded that “Mr. Potts”
might be fictional.
Yet Caelan was keeping an open mind as regarded a forsaken nobleman. Someone had sent Clara fleeing to the Highlands.
That someone was going to pay for his crimes.