Chapter Eleven
Over the course of the next few days, Helena did her best to forget the incident in the stables.
She knew very well that nothing could come of her growing attraction to Isaac, so why linger on it? Instead, she decided the best course of action would be to avoid him entirely and throw herself into work. She was now a maid, so she would focus on becoming the best maid Rowan Hall had ever seen.
So, with great effort, she did her best to put all thoughts of Isaac Rowan out of her mind.
In the days that followed, Helena absorbed herself in her duties, and it brought a kind of change in her that she had not expected. It was not the dramatic reversal of fortune she had imagined might someday restore her to her old life, but something quieter and more surprising.
The slow, unremarkable business of becoming, in fact as well as in name, a competent housemaid.
She still erred, now and again—a linen closet organised in the wrong sequence, a fire laid with too little kindling to properly catch—but the errors came less frequently now, and Mrs Ellis had begun entrusting her with tasks of greater responsibility.
Much of the credit for her improvement, she knew, belonged to her newest friend, Mary Collins.
Mary had worked in the kitchens, but had been away caring for her sick grandmother when Helena first arrived at Rowan Hall. But she had returned a week ago and they had become fast friends.
Mary was a cheerful, endlessly talkative girl scarcely younger than Helena herself, who had taken to her with an openness that made Helena's constant careful guardedness feel, by comparison, almost like a betrayal of the friendship being offered.
Mary explained the household's unwritten rules with the patient thoroughness of an elder sister.
She corrected Helena's mistakes quietly, before Mrs Ellis or anyone else had cause to notice them, and asked for nothing in return beyond company and conversation, unaware that the woman she had befriended was not the person she believed her to be.
Helena found herself, more than once, desperately wanting to tell her the truth. She did not, of course. She had learned, in the weeks since fleeing London, exactly how much safety depended on her silence.
That afternoon, Helena and two other housemaids were polishing silver in the servants' hall. She did her best to focus on the job, knowing Mrs Ellis would expect nothing less than her reflection staring back at her when they were done.
Yet, as hard as she tried to focus, she could not, due to Ruth and Betty's insistent chatter.
"He's not like any lord I've ever heard tell of," Ruth said, working a cloth over a candlestick.
"My cousin's in service at Ashworth Grange, and she says the master there scarcely knows his own footmen's names.
Lord Rowan asked after old Simmons's rheumatism just last week, and remembered it besides, when Simmons mentioned it again. "
"He's too handsome to spend all his days buried in those account books, if you ask me," Betty replied. "With those shoulders, and that face, scars and all—I don't know how Mrs Ellis expects any of us to keep our minds on our work with him about the place."
"I shouldn't mind at all," Ruth agreed, with a sly glance around the table, "if he looked at me the way he looks at Nell."
The girls laughed and Helena felt her face heat despite her best effort to remain unmoved. She quickly bent closer over her polishing cloth, as though sufficient concentration might disguise the colour rising in her cheeks.
"Nell hasn't said two words about it," Clara said, glancing toward her with open curiosity now. "Go on, then—has he looked at you particular? You'd tell us, wouldn't you?"
"There's nothing to tell," Helena said, keeping her voice as flat and unbothered as she could manage. "His lordship's kind enough to all the staff. I've done nothing to earn any particular notice."
It was a lie, though. She had told them nothing of the lessons, nothing of the dance in the darkened ballroom or the moment in the training barn that had ended only by Tom's interruption, and the careful evasion of it sat uneasily in her chest.
For the remainder of the afternoon's work, despite her best efforts, Nell found herself more irritated by the girls' teasing than she usually would.
This is silly, she told herself.
It was nothing more than ordinary discomfort at being teased about a man whose good opinion she had, for practical reasons, taken some care to secure.
But privately, she could not quite convince herself the irritation was so simple as that.
Because she could not entirely deny the substance of what the maids had been teasing her about. Isaac was an exceptionally attractive man, in a manner unlike any gentleman she had ever been introduced to in London's ballrooms.
So yes, she found him attractive. Part of her did desire him. But it did not matter, because it could not happen.
Nell changed the subject in her own mind as firmly as she had changed it aloud, and did not allow herself to return to it again that afternoon, though the effort of avoiding it proved harder than she wished to admit.
***
That evening brought Rowan Hall's first formal dinner under its new master's ownership, a gathering of neighbouring lords and landowners drawn, Helena suspected, as much by curiosity as by any genuine social obligation.
It was an opportunity, however politely disguised, to examine for themselves the former prizefighter who had so unexpectedly become their equal.
Helena was assigned to serve wine through the meal, a position that placed her at the edges of the room throughout the evening. Near enough to observe without drawing particular notice. She found herself watching Isaac with close attention.
He conducted himself, at first, with a confidence that filled her with quiet, private pride.
He welcomed his guests correctly, waited for his highest-ranking guest to begin each course before lifting his own fork, held his wine by the stem without apparent thought, and guided the table's conversation with a steadiness that bore almost no resemblance to the man who had once stared at an arrangement of cutlery with open bewilderment.
She watched him navigate an increasingly complex web of introductions and pleasantries with a composure that would have seemed, only weeks before, beyond him.
Something warm settled in her chest at the sight of it.
However, the evening's tone began to shift somewhere past the second course.
"Tell me, Lord Rowan," one gentleman asked, his smile pleasant enough to nearly disguise the barb beneath it. "Do you still keep your boxing gloves close to hand? I understand a man in your former profession never quite loses the habit."
"Old habits die hard," Isaac agreed, although Helena noticed his tone was strained beneath the pleasantness.
"Parliament must feel considerably safer these days," another gentleman added, not long after. "Knowing a champion fighter now occupies one of its seats. I daresay no one dares filibuster too long in your presence, My Lord, for fear of the consequences."
More laughter followed.
"Just glad to be of service," Isaac said shortly, his shoulders settling into a rigid line.
But then an elderly lord near the head of the table cleared his throat, and all eyes turned to him.
"Breeding cannot be learned from books, whatever else a man might master," the old lord said. "Some men remain common, I'm afraid, however grand the title bestowed upon them. It is simply a matter of blood, and no inheritance can alter it."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Helena watched Isaac set down his wine glass with a precision that carried, beneath its careful control, a great deal of anger.
Dread flared in the pit of her stomach. She knew, with utter certainty, that something bad was about to happen.
"With respect, My Lord," Isaac said, his voice low and level.
"I'd say honest labour earns a man rather more respect than inherited arrogance ever has.
I've met tenants on my own land who've contributed more to this world in a single season's honest work than half the men at this table have managed in a lifetime of doing nothing beyond being born to the right family. "
The table erupted. Several gentlemen rose from their chairs, visibly affronted.
"I have never in my life been spoken to in such a manner at another man's table," one declared, tossing his napkin down beside his plate.
"Sit down, Harwick, for heaven's sake," another muttered, tugging at his sleeve. "There's no cause to make more of it than—"
"No cause? The man's as good as called us idle parasites in our own—well, in his own dining room!"
"I only meant to say," the second man said, in raising his voice to be heard over the others, "that perhaps we might all benefit from a calmer—"
"I shan't sit through another course of this," Harwick said, already turning for the door. "Marchbanks, are you coming? I find I've quite lost my appetite."
Helena stood frozen near the sideboard, wine bottle still in hand, watching the whole disaster unfold with a helpless, sinking dismay.
Within a matter of minutes, the dinner had dissolved, offended. Guests called for their carriages and departed Rowan Hall at once, their exits accompanied by exactly the kind of whispered commentary Helena suspected would follow Isaac through every drawing room in the county by week's end.
The servants moved quickly to clear the ruined remains of the evening once the last carriage had departed, an uneasy silence settling over the house in the aftermath. It was in that silence that Helena watched Isaac withdraw alone into the study, his expression weary.
She finished her own duties as quickly as she could, and then, against every instinct, made her way to the study door and knocked softly.
"Come in."
He stood at the window with his back to the door, shoulders set in the same rigid line she had watched tighten through the whole of dinner, and did not turn as she entered.
"Isaac." Helena kept her voice gentle.
She crossed partway into the room before stopping, uncertain how near her welcome extended.
"I only wanted to say—you shouldn't let ignorant men decide your worth for you. You handled yourself far better than you believe you did tonight. What you said was true, every word of it, whatever offence they chose to take from hearing it."
Isaac did not turn.
"I've watched you learn a hundred things these past weeks that men born to this life take for granted," she continued, some part of her pressing forward despite the silence, wanting badly to offer him whatever comfort she could.
"You've earned more of a place here than any of them are willing to admit, and I don't believe—"
"Leave me alone."
The words landed with a sharpness that stopped her, his voice cutting through the room with none of the warmth she had come to expect from him, none of the easy humour that had marked every one of their evenings together.
He turned from the window at last, and the look on his face held none of the softness she had seen there in the ballroom, in the barn—only a raw, closed-off anger that seemed, in this moment, to include her within its reach.
"I've no wish for conversation," he said. "Nor comfort, from you or anyone else. Just leave me be."
The words struck harder than Helena had expected, almost like a physical blow. For a moment she could only stand there, caught off guard by the coldness.
"Forgive me, My Lord," she said quietly, lowering her eyes. "I didn't mean to intrude."
She left without waiting for any further response, closing the study door softly behind her.
She made her way back through the quiet house toward her small attic room with a hollow, unsettled feeling she could not quite name.
It was not anger, precisely, though there was some of that mixed within it, but something closer to hurt.
She had offered him comfort and found it thrown back at her with a coldness she had never once thought him capable of showing her.
Maybe she had been wrong about what she thought was growing between them. Maybe he only thought of her as a maid who was useful to him on occasion.
Fine, she thought.
If that was how he felt, then that was what she would be: a maid in his household and nothing more.